Quotes from Sherman Alexie

What scares me least? The Afterlife. Really. Who cares? I'm going to be a good person no matter what is supposed to happen after I die.

we worship the salmon because we eat salmon

I'm a features writer, and an Indian at that, so I get all the shit jobs. Not the dangerous shit jobs or the monotonous shit jobs. No. I get to write the articles designed to please the eye, ear, and heart. And there is no journalism more soul-endangering to write than journalism that aims to please.

Am I defined by what I've seen, or do I define the world by what I've witnessed? O, what beautiful or terrible thing waits around the next corner? Who isn't in love with this mystery?

Afterward I sat at a picnic table, feeling that post-performance emotional letdown (that I would later, thanks to Brene Brown, be able to more accurately describe as a vulnerability hangover), and smiled when Jim sat across from me.

Jesus, Junior said, all these years since Columbus landed and now he's finally decided to fuck me in the ass.

Can a book rightfully be called a book if it never gets read?

If a tree falls in a forest and gets pulped to make paper for a book that never gets read, but there's nobody there to read it, does it make a sound?

She's gone, she's gone.' Paul sang the chorus of that Hall & Oates song. He sang without irony, for he was a twenty-first-century American who'd been taught to mourn his small and large losses by singing Top 40 hits.

Sometimes you don't something is true until you hear it for the first time.

I began to count mile markers, made mental lists of everything I really needed: a new pair of shoes, a winter coat for the baby, a ticket for a Greyhound traveling back or ahead five hundred years.

I thought that once I figured out thirteen, then it was history

My parents sold blood for money to buy food. Poverty was our spirit animal.

When people consider the meaning of genocide, they might only think of corpses being pushed into mass graves. But a person can be genocided—can have every connection to his past severed—and live to be an old man whose rib cage is a haunted house built around his heart.

I really miss those cafeterias they use to have in Kmart. I don't know why they stopped having those. If there is a Heaven then I firmly believe it's a Kmart cafeteria.

I can take a single hair from the braids of an Indian woman and make it sound like a promise come true. Like a thousand promises come true.

I guess every song has a special meaning for someone somewhere. Elvis Presley is still showing up in 7-11 stores across the country, even though he's been dead for years, so I figure music just might be the most important thing there is.

We all justify our sins, venal or mortal.

Despite all the talk of diversity and division--of red and blue states, of black and white and brown people, of rich and poor, gay and straight--Paul believed that Americans were shockingly similar. How can we be so different, thought Paul, if we all know the lyrics to the same one thousand songs?

He didn't do much of anything except ride that bike and listen to music.

Paul believed American greatness and the ghosts of that greatness surrounded him. But who could publicly express such a belief and not be ridiculed as a patriotic fool? Paul believed in his fellow Americans, in their extraordinary decency, in their awesome ability to transcend religion, race, and class, but what leftist could state such things and ever hope to get laid by any other lefty?

After all, one doesn't choose his culture nearly as much as one trips and falls into it.

I declared a truce with her, at least within myself. Or maybe it's only a partial truce because a half-truce is really just a surrender, right?

We order Diet since my father and I are both diabetic. Genetics, you know?